


The First Mistake

by BuzzCat



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Not Canon Compliant, Not Journal 3 Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-07 20:04:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21463771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BuzzCat/pseuds/BuzzCat
Summary: When the portal opens in the basement, everyone is there. Everyone sees it. And one other person falls through, someone who should have seen the cops at the Mystery Shack and gone straight home, not gone traipsing into whatever Dipper and Mabel had turned up now.OR, Wendy falls through the portal.
Relationships: Ford Pines & Wendy Corduroy
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	The First Mistake

Wendy’s first mistake was going to work. The second she walked up and saw the government agents surrounding the Mystery Shack, she should have gone home and stayed there. She should have waited until the next day to ask what was gong on. She should have stayed out of it.

But Wendy Corduroy had never been good at staying out of anything interesting or potentially illegal. She had never skirted trouble or stopped just because an authority figure told her ‘no’. Hell, if she had she never would have cut it working at the Mystery Shack in the first place. So instead of going home and staying there, she had waited. Even government guys couldn’t be there all day, right? She went home and had a lazy day. Her dad had taken the boys on a fishing trip and aside from the occasional moments where gravity was slacking on the job, Wendy had a relaxing day of watching bad movies and texting Tambry.

As night started to fall and Wendy heard the helicopters leave from the direction of the Mystery Shack, Wendy grabbed her ax—call it a hunch that something was awry—and left a note for her dad—“Hanging with friends. Will be back later.”—before walking over to the Mystery Shack. Gravity kept crapping out and more than once Wendy found herself clinging to a tree branch to keep from floating off into nothing, but otherwise the walk was uneventful. The more things got weird, the more she absolutely knew that Dipper and Mabel were at the source of the weird and would at least be able to explain it.

As Wendy walked up the steps to the giftshop, ax safely tucked in the back of her belt to keep from freaking out any government guys, she heard the beeping of the vending machine, more beeps than it should have taken to get a candy bar.

She opened the front door to find Mabel, Dipper, and Soos staring down a stairway that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday.

“Hey guys.”

All three turned to her. “Wendy!”

“So what’s the deal with this?” she asked, approaching the group and gesturing at the staircase.

“I don’t know,” Dipper said with equal amounts of fear and awe in his voice. He took a step toward it, Mabel right beside him and Soos standing behind the pair. Wendy pulled her ax from her belt, following last down the stairs. The light made everything grimy, like nothing had been cleaned in decades. A six-figured handprint glowed on the wall as Wendy passed. She paused, looking at it and frowning.

“Hey Dipper, isn’t this—”

“The handprint from the journal!” Dipper stood in front of it, pulling out the journal and holding it up next to the handprint. The hands seemed to be the same size. Dipper spoke softly, “The Author. He must have built—but why did Stan—”

“Guys, come look at this!” Mabel called from inside the next room. Wendy and Dipper stepped forward. The next room was barely more than a metal platform. Mabel was standing in front of an elevator, Soos beside her. She gestured at it like a presenter on a game show with a new prize, “We could have been avoiding the stairs all summer!”

Dipper stared at the keypad beside the elevator. His eyes darted over the symbols on the keys before he opened the Journal, flipping through pages frantically. Soos stood in front of the elevator, hat in hand and twisting it back and forth nervously. “Don’t you guys think we should wait or Stan? He told me to protect this with my life and this—”

“Stan’s been lying to us ALL SUMMER! All summer he’s been saying Gravity Falls is just a normal town, and the whole time he was hiding this from us. We’re not waiting for him.” Dipper’s fingers punched in the code and the elevator doors slid open. All four of them stepped in and the doors closed behind them, the elevator already beginning to move. But it was moving down. Dipper looked at the buttons inside.

“It looks like where we got on is the highest the elevator goes. So that means…” The elevator doors whooshed open to reveal a room of dark screens and flashing lights. Buttons and dials and gizmos covered every inch of wall, aside from a desk in front of a plexiglass window into a room with the spinning light. But it wasn’t the light that had distracted Dipper.

“The other two JOURNALS?!” He ran forward, placing his own journal beside the first two. They were a matched set. “Why? Why does Stan have the other two Journals? And that handprint in the hallway—” Wendy could see the math Dipper was doing and it slid like an ice cube into her stomach.

“Woah, hey, that’s a big conclusion to jump to—”

“No! In Stan’s room, we found a box of IDs that don’t say Stan Pines. And there’s an article, an article that said that Stan Pines died years ago. The Stan we know isn’t Stan!”

“Dude, that guy’s been wanted by the cops for like a zillion years. Is that surprising?”

“But the article said he was dead! Look!” Dipper thrust the article they’d found at Wendy and she had to admit, it didn’t look good. Dipper, meanwhile, had started opening the Journals. The first two were bookmarked to a page of a strange diagram and he propped them open before taking the third Journal and flipping to a page matching the other two. It was a perfect fit. He pulled out his blacklight and the end of the world came alive on the page. As Dipper read it aloud, Wendy watched the countdown tick lower and lower. She couldn’t believe it. Stan was an old man with more secrets than the average person, but everyone had secrets. End of the world secrets? That seemed a little out of character. Something here didn’t fit. Something was missing in this puzzle.

As the kids and Soos went running for the shutdown switches, Wendy moved closer to the portal. She was careful to mind the safety line though; really who put just a line on the floor to protect against this? A button popped up from the handle behind her, red and shiny like all shutdown buttons should be. Dipper stood over it, hand high.

“This all stops now—”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT BUTTON!”

Everyone jumped when Stan shouted, practically collapsed against the doorframe and washed pale from the light of the spinning portal. Dipper glared at him and Mabel looked heartbroken, while Soos was—perhaps for the first time in his life—eying Stan suspiciously. Wendy did her best to keep her face quiet. Stan had to have a reason. There was no way he didn’t have a reason. He needed to have a damn good reason.

But just then, gravity stopped working and Wendy found herself floating. She was up in the air with her hair floating weightless around her.

And the spinning portal seemed to be getting closer.

“Wendy!” Dipper shouted at her. But Wendy couldn’t hear him. A buzzing sound filled her ears, the kind that she hadn’t heard since her dad had sat her down to explain that Mommy wasn’t coming home any more.

“Holy fuck.” Wendy whispered, watching as she floated over the yellow line. She looked up, meeting Stan’s eye. Panic sank in as she started desperately swimming away, but the portal had her in its pull.

“Stan!”

But Stan was silent, frozen as he stared. The kids were screaming for her to come back. Soos pushed off from the wall, trying to doggy-paddle through antigravity. But as her feet slid into the white light felt something slither past her toe, she knew this was it.

Wendy shot one look back at the people—her people—before turning to face the portal. She was up to her waist in it now, but held the ax in one hand. With a faint _sloop!_ the portal pulled her in.

In a flash, gravity returned. The portal was shattered and Wendy was gone.

When Ford saw the portal appear, he was relieved. Naturally occurring portals were rare in this dimension, one of endless rolling dessert and enormous sandworms, and the elements to fix his portal gun even more so. As he ran toward the portal, he thought about what a stroke of luck it was that the portal had appeared

When a red-head flannel-clad teenage girl with an ax in hand tumbled out of the portal and rolled to a ready position, he was significantly less relieved. In a blink he had his gun in hand, pointed with unwavering aim at the girl.

“What are you?” 

The girl assessed him before lowering her ax and starting to brush away the sand that covered her shirt.

“I’m pissed. What are you?”

Earth. She was from Earth. Or at least, an Earth. Ford looked at the girl. Aside from the ax in her hand, she was unprepared for the multiverse. And besides that, she couldn’t have been seventeen years old.

He holstered his gun and held out a hand. “Stanford Pines.”

The girl jumped back like his hand was on fire, ax immediately pulled back and ready to swing.

“You back the fuck up, buddy. I’ve wrecked a shapeshifter before and I’m absolutely down to do it again.

“What? I’m not a shapeshifter—”

“Can it! I know Stan Pines and you aren’t him.”

“Stan? How do you know Stanley?”

The anger seemed to go out of the girl a bit, but her arm did not waver. “Stanford.”

“Stanf—” Ford froze. Stanley, who had arrived at his door maybe possibly homeless. Stanley, who likely was a wanted man in multiple states. Stanley, who had a track record of taking and breaking Ford’s things.

“That good for nothing waste!” Ford roared into the desert. The girl looked at him, still ready but confused. Ford continued, “He took my name! Stanley is my twin brother who took my name!”

The girl shook her head, “Nope. I ain’t buying it. He’s been Stanford Pines longer than I’ve been alive and shapeshifters are lying motherfuckers. Next you’ll start telling me you’re the author of the journal.”

Ford’s head whipped around. “You’ve read my journals?”

The girl squinted at him and Ford could see her anger downgrade to intense suspicion. “Describe it.”

“Red cover, metal corners. A golden six-fingered hand on the cover with a number.”

The girl eyed him a moment longer before putting the ax away, finally moving out of her tense pose. “Three. The journal I’ve seen is three. But I never read it. Just…lived some of it.” She straightened up and took him in critically before offering her name, “Wendy Corduroy.”

“Boyish Dan has a little sister?”

Wendy frowned at that. “No. I’m his daughter.”

Ford stilled, frozen in the middle of the handshake. “What year is it? For you?”

“Twenty-twelve.”

Ford paled. “That is…significantly later than anticipated.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know this isn't a super satisfactory ending, but I wanted to get it off my computer. Wendy and Ford would have such an interesting dynamic as she is everything he hates in his own brother but like, with emotional intelligence and communications skills mixed in. I think they'd butt heads on everything and I'm so sad there's not more content of Wendy just going apeshit on Ford for being a shitty brother when he first came through the portal. Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Thanks for reading!


End file.
